Quotes by Professors - Page 27

He's already tan, and leaning on the rail in his yellow linen shirt, with the pure glory of Venice racing behind him, I think he looks like someone I'd like to run off with, if I already hadn't.
Frances Mayes
You see, the world is as big as an elephant or small as a grain of sand, depending on you. You can let it stomp you, gore you, swallow you up. Or you can let it slip into your shell and turn into a pearl.” -- Benjamin East
Jonathan Freedman
Not everyone's life will be a great love story.
Scott Hutchins
She looked at me for a second and said, "Oh, never mind. I guess it's true what Mom said? That you've led a sheltered life?"I said I thought the description fairly apt.
Susan Hubbard
Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child.
Joyce Carol Oates
For the first time in human history, most people are doing things that could never interest a child enough to want to tag along. That says less about the child than about us.
Anthony M. Esolen
The worst part of childhood is not knowing that bad things pass, that time passes. A terrible moment in childhood hovers with s kind of eternity, unbearable.
David Vann
Are there many little boys who think they are a Monster? But in my case I am right said Geryon to the Dog they were sitting on the bluffs The dog regarded himJoyfully
Anne Carson
So childhood too feels good at first, before one happens to notice the terrible sameness, age after age.
John Gardner
Childhood is the barrel they give you/to go over the falls in.
Linda McCarriston
Joshie has always told Post Human Services Staff to keep a diary, to remember who we were because every moment, our brains and synapses are being rebuilt and rewired with maddening disregard for our personalities, so that each year, each month, each day, we transfer into a different person, an utterly unfaithful iteration of our original selves, of the drooling kid in the sandbox. But not me. I am still a facsimile of my early childhood. I am still looking for a loving dad to lift me up and brush the sand off my ass and to hear English, calm and hurtless, fall off his lips.
Gary Shteyngart
Here is the door of my mom's house, well-remembered childhood portal. Here is the yard, and a set of wires that runs from the house to a wooden pole, and some fat birds sitting together on the wires, five of them lined up like beads on an abacus.
Dan Chaon
When the dawn light is coursing through the slats in the shutters at last, making thin stripes on the floor, she, tossing, decides that for every human soul there must surely be a possible childhood worth living, but once it slips by, there isn’t any reclaiming it or revising it.
Gregory Maguire
You're born thinking you're the centre of things, and they chip away at that until you expire muttering If I knew then, or some nonsense in an empty rooming house.
Mark Anthony Jarman
It's way too easy to get used to losing, it does something small to you.
Mark Anthony Jarman
A calendar was hung in the kitchen as if to say: Expect more of the same.
Gary Lutz
What about stakes in the heart?" I asked now. He frowned, the center of his mouth pursed while its corners curled downward. "Anyone will die from a stake in the heart," he said. "And anyone will die if they're severely burned, including vampires.
Susan Hubbard
It was the discovery of the quantum universe that changed everything, and that universe was so small and so dynamic that it could not be observed directly. Trying to explain their insights, scientists looked at the language of mysticism. At the subatomic level, the parallels between quantum reality and mysticism were striking. For example, the behavior of light: in some contexts it acted like a wave, in others like a particle. Could it be both? Physicists had no concept for grasping this, so they dispensed with Western logic and embraced paradox. (This is important, too, for the notion of vampires being both living and dead.)
Katherine Ramsland
In order to remain undead, I must steal the life force of someone whose fate matters less to me than my own.' I've always supposed that Wall Street traders utter essentially the same sentence.
Thomas C. Foster
in the modern era, many thinkers began to mistrust faith, viewing it as 'blind' and an enemy of reason. Their watchword was 'reason alone.' One of the difficulties of this stance is that reason cannot test its own reliability, any more than soapstone can test its own hardness. Any argument, accomplished by reasoning, that what reasoning accomplishes can be trusted, would be circular, because it would take for granted the very thing that it was trying to prove.Suppose I am at the window of a burning building. Although I can hear the firemen calling to me from far below, I cannot see them because of all the smoke. They are telling me to jump. Though I may have every reason to believe that they will catch me in their net, I may not trust them enough to overcome my fear, and so, hesitating, I burn to death. Obviously, my reasons are not the same as trust; faith surpasses reason. Even so they are reasons for trust; though faith surpasses reason, it is not irrational.
J. Budziszewski
for a purpose without reason
Donald Kingsbury
We think there's a reason for everything, as if life was supposed to make sense. It's not exactly math. People aren't numbers. Everybody knows life doesn't make any sense at all, so we just better deal with the whole mess. Have a beer. Have a cup of coffee. Have a piece of cake. Go out to a movie. Enjoy the Popcorn.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
All order, I've come to understand, is theoretical, unreal — a harmless, sensible, smiling mask men slide between the two great, dark realities, the self and the world — two snake pits.
John Gardner
I wanted to throw myself into an experience that was too big for me and learn in a way that cost me something
Jamie Zeppa
The most twisted but perennial of American myths is that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed. (p. 174)
Robin R. Meyers
You are so hot,” I said.“How hot?” she asked, toying with the hem of the shirt.“Ionising radiation hot,” I said. “Neutral pion decay hot.”Elena snorted. “You’re such a romantic,” she said.
David Walton
Marry me, Esme. Please. Honor me. I will honor you as your husband never did. Our marriage would be a remedy against sin, if anyone could ever call it a sin to love you.”Sebastian Bonnington to Esme Rawlings
Eloisa James
I never thought of it like that. I always thought of you as a part of me, like my own eyes or my own hands. You don't go around thinking 'I love my eyes, I love my hands', do you? But think what it would be like to live without your eyes or your hands. To be mad, or to be blind. I can't talk about it. It's how I feel.
Elizabeth Marie Pope
A gentleman can hardly continue to sit,' he explained, in his serenest and most level voice, 'when he asks a very remarkable young lady to do him the honor of marrying him. And - 'he somehow contrived to grin at me wickedly, 'I usually get what I want, Miss Grahame,' he added, and pitched over in a tangled heap on the floor.
Elizabeth Marie Pope
How did you ever happen to remember that I might be hungry? But of course you would. Will you mind very much if I run myself into serious difficulties now and again after we are married, just for the pleasure of seeing you rise to the occasion?
Elizabeth Marie Pope
Put him in there and chain him up," he ordered curtly. "Yes, that chain, you fool - do you see any other chain in that cell? Peaceable Sherwood? I'm tired of hearing about Peaceable Sherwood! Turn him loose in the cell for the night. - Which one of you said 'Where'll he be by morning?' Where does he look like he's going to be by morning, I ask you - a hundred and fifty miles away?"I was, to be exact, only seven and a half miles away by morning...
Elizabeth Marie Pope
Feeling for the first time what it meant to kick open doors that kept closing, no matter how many legends had already passed through.
Richard Powers
If a dog can love us unconditionally, why can't we love each other in the same way?
Carol McKibben
The greatest threat to religion in any society is not persecution, but rather apathy born of irrelevance.
Sherman A. Jackson
The Islamic intellectual tradition has usually not seen a dichotomy between intellect and intuition but has created a hierarchy of knowledge and methods of attaining knowledge according to which degrees of both intellection and intuition become harmonized in an order encompassing all the means available to man to know, from sensual knowledge an reason to intellection and inner version or the "knowledge of the heart.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
The question, therefore, is not whether one should teach philosophy to Muslim students, but rather what kind or kinds of philosophy should be taught and how the subject should be approached.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
From my earliest works written in the 1950s and 1960s, I have claimed that there is such a thing as Islamic science with a twelve-hundred-year tradition of its own and that this science is Islamic not only because it was cultivated by Muslims, but because it is based on a worldview and a cosmology rooted in the Islamic revelation.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
The statement 'the Shariah says...' is thus automatically misleading, as there is almost always more than one answer to any legal question.
Jonathan A.C. Brown
The Islamic Revolution, as it turned out, did more damage to Islam by using it as an instrument of oppression than any alien ever could have done.
Azar Nafisi
Soon there would be the evening call to prayer and all over Zinder people would be thanking Allah for the gift of one more day, of one more moment in which to live and breathe.
Kathleen Hill
The gnostic is Muslim in that his whole being is surrendered to God; he has no separate individual existence of his own. He is like the birds and the flowers in his yielding to the Creator; like them, like all the elements of the cosmos, he reflects the Divine to his own degree. He reflects it actively, however, they passively; his participation is a conscious one.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
The stupid girl thinks Muslim is a language.
Jill Ciment
A message was sent by the regime to the faithful: to survive they would have to be loyal to only one interpretation of the faith, and to accept the new political role of the clergy. Father felt that this spelled the end of Islam in our country, and he did have a point. 'No foreign power,' he said, 'could destroy Islam the way these people have.
Azar Nafisi
As we have seen in the data, resentment against the West comes from what Muslims perceive as the West's hatred and denigration of Islam; the Western belief that Arabs and Muslims are inferior,; and their fear of Western intervention, domination, or occupation. (p. 141)
John L. Esposito
The Orient and Islam have a kind of extrareal, phenomenologically reduced status that puts them out of reach of everyone except the Western expert. From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing th orient could not do was to represent itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed through and been made firm by the refining fire of the Orientalist’s work.
Edward Said
Interestingly, the more Americans report knowing about Muslim countries, the more likely they are to hold positive views of those countries. (p. 155)
John L. Esposito
The anti-religious modernism which now threatens Islam and Muslims everywhere can be fully understood only by understanding the religion of the civilization in whose bosom modernism first developed, against which it rebelled, and whose tenets it has been challenging through constant battle since the birth of the modern world in the Renaissance.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
For anyone who understood the essence of modernism based on and originating in the secularizing and humanistic tendencies of the European Renaissance, it was easy to detect the confrontation that was already taking place between traditional and modern elements in the Islamic world.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
Sophia was asked to speak to the students of a local medical school.t“Sophia, what do we need to be better doctors?” the students asked.t“Doctors,” Sophia said, “need strong stomachs and strong powers of observation.” Then she opened a canister. The putrid smell quickly moved through the classroom. Sophia stuck a finger in the jar, pulled it up, and then licked it. She passed the jar around encouraging each doctor in training to do the same. Each did, and though many felt nauseas, no one got sick.t“You all have very strong stomachs,” she said. “But your powers of observation need some work.”t“What do you mean?” they asked. “We did just what you did.”t“There is one difference,” she replied. “The finger I dipped in the jar was not the finger I licked.
David W. Jones
Open-mindedness is a precondition for generating new ideas, but focusing on the problem is almost equally important.
Eraldo Banovac
Children content with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere.
Sherry Turkle
There is a rich literature on how to break out of quandary thinking. It suggests that sometimes it helps to turn from the abstract to the concrete.
Sherry Turkle
A novel is just a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.
George Saunders
We were afraid of so many things: Of our children, who lived in their own world of casually lurid pleasures, zombies and cartoon killers and thuggish music. Of our neighbors, who were buying gold and ammunition and great quantities of freeze-dried food, and who were organizing themselves into angry tribes recognizable to one another by bumper stickers.
Jean Thompson
Bela had thought she knew what love felt like, but when she saw Sanjay at the airport after six long months, her heart gave a great, hurtful lurch, as though it were trying to leap out of her body to meet him. This, she thought. This is it. But it was only part of the truth. She would learn over the next years that love can feel a lot of different ways, and sometimes it can hurt a lot more.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
My mother clutches at the collar of my shirt. I rub her back and feel her tears on my neck. It's been decades since our bodies have been this close. It's an odd sensation, like a torn ligament knitting itself back, lumpy and imperfect, usable as long as we know not to push it too hard.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
He downs the contents of his glass in a single gulp and, looking at Simon, adds: “This is as amusing as a novel.
Laurent Binet
Why else do we write and write except to move our readers?
Jerome Charyn
The men were smashing windows and aiming their weapons through them. The driver had opened the door and was shouting for the women and children to get out and run and hide. But Ilina realized in some vague way that he never managed to actually say the word "hide." He really said, "Women and children, get out, get out, get out! Run and..." The clerk's wife thought it was odd that he had stopped in the middle of a sentence, and even stranger that she herself knew the word, heard the word "hide" in her head when the driver stopped talking.
Clark Zlotchew
You have to follow your own voice. You have to be yourself when you write. In effect, you have to announce, 'This is me, this is what I stand for, this is what you get when you read me. I'm doing the best I can - buy me or not - but this is who I am as a writer.
David Morrell